The reason this happened is that while Sinofsky had the maniacal power and force of will of a Steve Jobs, he lacked Jobs' best gift: An innate understanding of good design. Windows 8 is not well-designed. It's a mess. But Windows 8 is a bigger problem than that. Windows 8 is a disaster in every sense of the word.

This is not open to debate, is not part of some cute imaginary world where everyone's opinion is equally valid or whatever. Windows 8 is a disaster. Period.

Paul Thurrott shares some of his inside information, and it's pretty damning. According to him, Sinofsky's team - even up to his major supporter, Steve Ballmer - were removed from the company after it became clear just much of a disaster Windows 8 was.

I agree with his conclusion: razor-sharp focus on productivity, Windows' number one use. The desktop side of Windows 8.x is pretty good as it is, and has been progressively getting better with every update. I would go one step further than Thurrott. Windows 9 (desktops/laptops) and Windows Metro (tablets/smartphones). These two can still be one product (e.g., connect a keyboard/mouse/monitor to your x86 smartphone and it opens the desktop), but they should be entirely separate environments.

Soon our mobile devices will be powerful enough (hardware wise) to be used as "good" desktops by the majority.

It means people will just "dock" them (probably just will place it on top of something with no need to wire connections) grab a keyboard with a touch pad on it, turn on the monitor (or tv) and do the things we do on desktops. It was already tried but the tech was not good enough then. I hope it will work like our current virtualized OS guests, where you can just start the proper interface (i.e., a two OS approach, well, actually three if you count the supervisor) and may even have extra processing power available on the dock.

This is probably the reason MS is so afraid. It has nothing to do with "Desktops" death, this will not happen, but with the fact that whoever control the mobile space will end up controlling also the desktop.